For well over a year I was a supremely happy Liberator.com affiliate.
I was happy not only because my readers seemed to enjoy — judging by the number of purchases– Liberator’s affiliate banners, but also because I have adored every one of their products that I’ve tried. The Zeppelin? Heavenly. The Esse? Brilliant. And the Throe? If possible, I’ll take it to my grave.
So it was with extreme pleasure that I watched the dollars add up. Every time I logged into my affiliate account I imagined how much fun the items’ new owners were having and a happy jolt passed from brain to cunt.
Um. Surely I’m not the only one who gets slightly excited by this sort of thing?
Eventually enough dollars accumulated that I reached Liberator’s very high pay-out amount. Some affiliate programs issue payments at $50 or $100; Liberator requires $200 before they’ll pay. Is this because the products tend to be pretty pricey? Or because they figure that few will stick with the program long enough to earn that much? I don’t know, but since I’d reached the level without undue fuss I didn’t much worry. I gleefully clicked Liberator’s “Pay Me Now” button and waited for my miniature windfall.
Almost immediately I began to hear murmurings that all was not well in the land of water-resistant sex positioning furniture. “They’re delaying payments,” one rumor went. “The whole program is frozen,” said another, and my previous confidence began slipping. I fired off an email to the company requesting information. It went unanswered. More rumors reached my ears. Am I ever going to get paid, I wondered, realizing that by then it had been many more days than one might reasonably expect for a check to wing its way from Atlanta to the Upper Midwest. Does anyone have a number for their main office, I asked via Twitter, and Twitter once again proved itself to be capable of answering my every question.
Reader, I called them. Immediately I was connected to someone who was not, by her own admission, in charge of the program. She was, however, quite chatty. “We’re a couple months behind,” she told me frankly. “We’re paying the big guys — the ones we owe hundreds or thousands of dollars to — first. The little guys like you are seeing their payments delayed.”
Well that’s hardly fair, quoth I.
“Not much I can do about it,” she said, and that’s when I asked to speak to her boss. Of course she wasn’t around; I was encouraged to email her (I already have, I pointed out to no avail), and the conversation was over. Imagine my surprise when not even five minutes later my phone rang and on the other end I found the head of the affiliate program herself.
“Problems? In our program? Delays in payments? Of course not,” she said, and went on to explain fourteen ways to Sunday how they were just transitioning over to a new program and while payments might seem ever so slightly delayed in my perception, in reality everything was perfectly, glowingly fine. Just fine. In fact things were so fine that they’d decided to lower the pay-out amount from $200 to just $100.
Hm, I said. So might I have my check?
“Of course!” she gushed. “We’ll put it in the mail today!”
And the check did indeed arrive in the exact number of days one might expect for a missive sent from Liberator corporate headquarters. Only one problem. The check was not for two-hundred-plus dollars. Instead it was for roughly 70% of that amount.
What gives? I asked in an email to the head of the program. I earned twice the amount of your current payout, you promised to pay me, and this is what you send?
“You are so very wrong!” she said. “You earned over $200 but not all of that was eligible to be paid! You need to sell more in order to get your $200, you silly girl you!” And she continued on with an explanation I hardly heard due to a massive case of annoyance.
While I love Liberator products, I don’t love having to wonder if I’m going to get paid. Not even a little tiny bit. So how do I express my love without supporting an affiliate program which has (shall we say) issues? Here’s how: I’m sending you to Amazon, which is the best of both worlds. You get fabulous Liberator products (if you so desire) and I get paid.
Doesn’t get much better than that.
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Sending a big wet kiss and my thanks to Bacchus from ErosBlog who provided invaluable advice on the topic of affiliate programs and their foibles.
My eldest is a bit too young to have reached this phase yet, so would anyone else care to provide words of wisdom for the parent who last week sent me this missive:
I have an adolescent daughter – precocious, cute, and too smart for her own good. She’s been taught the mechanics of sexuality and was even in the delivery room watching her little brother being born. She’s been given a primer on masturbation by her mother. Boys have discovered her; she knows why, and has kept most of them at arms length.
But she is the exact demographic for every teen vampire novel. While I have no hope of derailing her notions of true love that lasts for eternity (literally) I have a small issue with her awareness of the connection between vampirism and sex (and her own sexuality). In and of itself, I get the fetish – but I just don’t want that being the original one shaping her own understanding of mature coupling.
I would rather she be reading something more explicit but more honest about the emotions and interactions of the characters. I worry that this new version of Harlequin Romance for teens creates an expectation that reality just can’t meet.
Thoughts? Advice? Suggestions for alternative reading material?
If I’d written this post yesterday as intended I would have told you how wonderful it’s been over these past few weeks to awaken each day to the sound of happy children fixing themselves breakfast in the kitchen.
Because, you see, suddenly the youngest two have begun to realize that going through the morning routine is ever so much easier if they follow mommy’s instructions calmly as opposed to shrieking their protest like angry bats. This has freed up their time for more industrious pursuits, such as brushing teeth without assistance (thrilling!), putting together puzzles away from my watchful guidance (scintillating!) or, most exciting of all, carrying out alone the small ceremonies of cereal preparation. This event has merged — coincidentally or not — with a new and frighteningly earnest desire by the eldest to sleep until the last possible moment; she now scorns the breakfast-making responsibilities once so fervently desired that she set her alarm for 5:30 am to avoid any chance that I’d beat her downstairs.
It’s been a real pleasure to loll in bed and eavesdrop on the little ones’ chatter as they decide which will be in charge of the cereal pouring and which the milk dribbling, because as I’m sure you can imagine this process is by no means neat. By the time I arrive raisins and flakes dot the floor but I cannot be concerned because at the counter they sit, beaming with pride and dewy with milk. “We made breakfast,” they proclaim, and my heart overflows with gratitude that no longer must I face the screams of infantile starvation which woke me during the first year of each child’s life, the demands of out now which greeted me during the second or the repetitively sodden bedclothes of the third. Now, I thought; now is when the good times roll.
And if I’d had less accessory work (or more energy; or a safe, arrest-risk-free source of crack) that’s the story I would have told. Alas it was not to be. Screams instead of murmurs woke me; when I was able to prise apart my eyelids I saw my weeping middle child standing before me. I might have thought that her head had been ripped off by wild bears but that the sounds coming from her throat left no question about its integrity. Blearily I scanned her for any other catastrophic damage. Finding none, I began gathering evidence from other sources. The smell of smoke? No, but there was another unusual scent working its way into my warm bed. It was minty and fresh, like toothpaste, or –
“He put gum in my hair!” she bellowed, pointing at the grinning imp who’d sidled up beside her.
“You put gum in her hair?” Parroting back questions to the opposing sibling is, I’ve found, an excellent way to buy a few seconds of time in which to ponder how a good mommy might handle the situation.
He nodded, still inexplicably grinning. “Why did you put gum in her hair?”
He answered with the kind of logic displayed by four-year-olds everywhere. “Because I wanted to, Mommy.”
This story has a happy ending. In the early days of mothering I absorbed the fact that neither ice nor peanut butter was the gold standard of gum removal. Simple cooking oil, they said (they being those other really smart mommies who have their shit together so much that their kids don’t get gum in their hair but they still know how to remove it from the slatternly lady’s kid’s hair) worked best at breaking the bonds between hair and gum. Only problem was, I didn’t have any cooking oil in my bedroom, and there was no flippin’ way I was traipsing downstairs before dawn to find some.
Even at the best of times my younger children’s birth mother is a most unreliable narrator of the events in her own life. So we must take it with a large crystal of en-a-see-ell when she reports that she was sternly rebuffed by her doctor when she requested that at the end of this pregnancy he tie her tubes. “You never know,” he allegedly said. “You might decide you want to have children of your own when you’re 35.”
At 10pm on a Friday night she let slip this anecdote; 28 weeks pregnant with her fourth child, hooked up to monitors in a hospital bed far from her own town and in pain from pre-term contractions she swore never to go down this road again. “Why don’t you get the implant after you deliver?” I asked, and that’s when she admitted the wish for a permanent fertility solution. A red haze blurred my vision. “Did you argue with him?” She shook her head no. “Honey, it’s the doctor’s job to give you the birth control you want. He doesn’t get to decide if you have any more children!”
“I knew he wasn’t going to do it for me,” she said. “Why would I argue with him?”
“Then you have to find someone else who will do it!” The nurse stopped fussing with the fetal monitor long enough to shoot me a look. I considered enlisting her help but she skittered out of the room before she could be dragged into the discussion.
Then the moment passed. My anger evaporated leaving behind only tepid resignation. This is but the smallest episode in the comedy of errors which so far makes up her reproductive life. Maybe I should be more hopeful. Maybe, along with her doctor, I should set my eye upon a time in the future when this girl gets her act together to such a degree that she can plan a pregnancy, hope for a pregnancy, truly desire the miracle of a pregnancy.
But that time is not now, and it alternately breaks my heart and makes me angry enough to kick holes in the wall that she’s judged for reproducing inappropriately while at the same time she lacks the means to fix the problem once and for all.
“Mom, I really want to read this,” my eldest said, watching yet again as the trailer played on the television set.
“That’s a book for grown-ups,” I told her. I wondered, not for the first time, why the ad was being shown during a family program.
“But I can read it! I’ve read other books for grown-ups!”
“Honey, it’s a scary book. I know the commercial doesn’t make it look that way, but it was written for adults.”
The bargaining then began in earnest. The child pointed out the all the other “grown-up” books with “scary” situations she’d read (The Lord of the Rings and Nancy Drew fell into this category). “I like scary books!” she whinged. “And you know I’m a good reader!”
I allowed that she was indeed a good reader. “Nevertheless,” I told her, “This is a book about a murder. I don’t think you really want to read that sort of thing.”
Oh but she did. “And,” she pointed out, “I’ve read other books with murders in them.”
I didn’t ask for an accounting of those books. “Honey, the murder is of a girl, someone not much older than you.”
“Mom, that’s ok! I’m not a baby anymore! And it looks interesting!”
“It is interesting!” Before the words were even out of my mouth I knew I’d screwed up.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why can’t I read it if you’ve read it?”
I went with an old standby. “Because I am an adult and you are not.” Bedtime fast approaching (and my patience dwindling) I threw down the final card. “Child, the book is about the rape and murder of a fourteen year old girl. Is that really what you want to read right now?”
She looked puzzled. “What’s rape?”
Oh lord, I thought. Can we possibly have talked as much as we have about sex without any prior mention of assault? “It’s when one person forces another person to have sex when they don’t want to.”
The puzzlement morphed into disgust. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t want to read that kind of book.” And without any desire to pose further questions (believe me, I asked), she trotted off to bed.
I remember watching her sleep just weeks after she was born, amazed that this tiny human being had not yet experienced anything worse than the most fleeting touch of hunger. I dreaded the time when real life would invade that dreamy existence even to the extent that I would have to tell her no.
By now she’s suffered under my gentle and at time far from gentle correction for ten long years. I’ve told her no more times than she has hairs on her head. And yesterday I introduced the concept of rape into her life, reminding me of the strange mixture of love and cruelty necessary in parenting, wherein too much love can only be cruelty and a tiny bit of seeming cruelty must be used in order to temper love.
Every death is unfair but some are more unfair than others.
A 90-year-old grandmother whose swift decline follows a long, full life surely experiences a more just death than does a child cut down by cancer before his tenth birthday. By the time I was half-way through my teens I’d seen both. That my grandmother suffered at the end was painfully obvious, as was the stress her care placed on my entire family. She’d been able to take almost no pleasure in life throughout the preceding months, so while I was sorry for the grief my parents felt, in whole her death seemed more of a relief than a cause for mourning.
The death of a classmate’s young cousin, however, brought nothing but questions. Why, after all the prayer vigils organized by every church in town including my own had the child died? Had we asked incorrectly? Or not enough? Was God’s plan so inscrutable as to require the agonizing death of a child? For the next fifteen years I asked this question in various ways as people in my circle died or otherwise experienced the ugliest aspects of life, until one night while driving home in tears from a funeral that followed a viciously unrighteous death I decided that God — if he even exists — simply doesn’t interfere.
At all.
The hypothesis fit better than any other. I could not accept that a god worthy of followers would allow some to suffer and evil to flourish unchecked. Nor could I buy that God answered prayers according to an unfathomable logic. Only a policy of rigid non-interference covered both the aspects of free will and human suffering. That, or we lived under no supreme being whatsoever. Either way we were left to our own devices and should expect nothing in the way of help from above.
Finally I was able to check the sobs that had kept me company since I left the funeral. Maybe I should have stayed in church all these years, I thought, wiping the tears off my face, for surely those people had figured out long before I did that God does not answer prayer. They’d figured it out — and still they believed. They’d figured it out — and still they talked to God.
I remembered the thoughts of that night recently while eavesdropping on two women from my childhood church who were discussing via Facebook the health of another devout parishioner:
Acquaintance One: Have you heard that Janet is not doing well at all? Pray hard for her.
Acquaintance Two: I know. It’s a sad situation for such a nice family. But I’m glad they have Christ in their lives.
Acquaintance One: Yes, I am glad, too. But the other side of that coin is how difficult it is to understand. Why is this happening to them?
Did they truly believe that only infidels died young? Or that a life of prayer guaranteed an easy passing? Almost through writing a reply which surely would have gotten me kicked off their friends list, I closed the browser and walked away. If years in church hadn’t convinced them that God doesn’t work like that then I certainly wouldn’t be able to in a paragraph on Facebook.
But I admit that my life is pretty sheltered from Christian-types at this exact moment. I run with an atheist, agnostic, pagan, secular-humanist crowd which sees prayer as at best a concentration of intention and at worse a conversation with an imagined friend. Maybe most Christians do believe in the power of prayer, and that good church-going souls should be the recipients of fair deaths. I really don’t know.
Those of you who are more familiar with current Christian thought on prayer should feel free to enlighten me.
I do not understand women who gush. I’ve been having orgasms for years and I never get that wet. I just don’t understand where it comes from, and to be honest it’s more than a little intimidating. How do these women do it? Do their partners find it sexy? Am I missing out on something amazing? And omg I can’t imagine having to deal with all that fluid when I’m done having sex!
Seems like back in the day when I started watching porn no one gushed, but now all I seem to run across are videos where there’s a fountain coming out of every female performer. I have to wonder if all this focus on the fluids creates unnecessary pressure on women. Have we come to believe that because porn girls gush, so must we? Do our partners expect the flow? Are they disappointed when there’s only a trickle?
Gushing is certainly not my thing but I know some of you love it. So please, educate me. What do you find hot about gushing? How does it feel for the gusher? Is it hard to take if you’re on the receiving end? Are gushing orgasms actually better than non-gushing orgasms?
And most importantly, how do you deal with all the wet bedding?
Notice, if you will, the focus on the self. No judgments are offered about how others must feel or should feel. The writer takes ownership of her opinions and seeks more information about other people’s experiences.
This, in contrast, is an example of a judgment:
Ew, “gushing” is so gross. When I see a porn scene where all this fluid (what is it anyhow, pee?) pours out of a woman I have to fast forward because it’s just disgusting.
I don’t intend to put down how anyone gets off but come on, how can this not be a huge risk for spreading around all kinds of unsanitary germs?
And you know what else gets me? When I go to a sex party and other people are gushing in public. Gross! How am I supposed to have a good time watching people do it when I’m assaulted by creepy fluids? Keep those N.A.S.T.Y. things private, jeez. My eyes will never be the same!
There’s got to be something seriously wrong with people who feel the need to show off with their bodily fluids. It’s just sick to spray other people, wall, beds — everything! — with your junk like that!
I don’t know about you, but I don’t have to knock milk bottles off fences at ten paces to prove I’m having a good time. Dear god folks, why don’t you stop copying porn and have some normal sex for once? Why?
Do you see the difference? This author does not address her own opinions and actions so much as she disparages others for theirs. Hey, there’s nothing wrong with this kind of writing. But it’s not sex-positive, it’s not open minded, and once it’s unleashed upon the sex-blogging community the author should gird her loins for an onslaught of opposing opinions.
On this day good people the world over must unite to put a stop to this madness disguised as progress, because some kinds of progress we simply do not need.
Am I speaking in this case of the scourge of too-big government? The infiltration of our once-proud country by the world’s cast-offs? The degenerate promotion of murder of the pre-born, destruction of traditional marriage or succor for those without health insurance? Frightful as those problems are, the issue of which I speak is even worse. It is in fact the number-one threat to the stability of our great nation today.
That threat is female ejaculation.
Yes, as much as it pains me to sully these pages or your refined ears with such unwholesome talk, we must indeed address the new horror of female ejaculation. “Gushing,” its sex-addled supporters call it, and even in this euphemism their tricks should be evident. Do you see how innocent they make it sound? How very natural, as though gushing were a normal, physical phenomena, like a geyser or a burbling brook? Nothing — nothing, my friends! — could be further from the truth.
Do not let yourself be deceived. Ejaculation is the sole domain of the male of the species. Female ejaculation does nothing to further the sacred purpose of sexuality and in fact only works against God’s will, as it unnaturally washes the male seed away from its holy destination. Gushing, they call it? I call it murder plain and simple. It is the murder of thousands upon thousands of sperm whose only sin was to come between a potential human life and the hideous succubus of female pleasure.
Today we are called into service against those who would destroy traditional intimacy and replace it with this fad, this aberration, this new-fangled abomination of all that is good and pure about sexuality. Let us stamp out this “gushing” wherever and whenever we see it. I charge you to switch off the television, my friends, when a female ejaculation scene appears on your pornography DVD. March that wicked disk right back to the store and demand a refund. “I will not support this unholy, germ-ridden practice,” you may tell the clerk. Hit the back button when gushing shows up on Xtube, or better yet, leave a low rating for the disgusting video. Let everyone know how you feel about this revolting habit.
(I trust we need say nothing about the ejaculating habits of the females in the audience today. Surely we all practice reproduction as God intended it; in other words, dry.)
My friends, we must turn our backs on what the world calls “progress.” We must fear the gushing vagina. Shun the gushing vagina. Allow this abhorrent perversion to continue in the privacy of perverts’ bedrooms if we must but never — never! — let them shove our faces into the gushing vagina. Never let it be said that we sat idly by while gushing became as accepted as missionary-style intercourse, purity balls or the holy practice of anal sex as a way to maintain virginity.
Let’s get back to a time when men were real men, women were real women, breasts were real breasts and sex was at best moist.
Thus concludes today’s lesson. Learn to spot the differences between opinion, judgment and satire so that sex-blogging can be more enjoyable for us all.
We had so many furry-gray rain-soaked days in a row that even an optimist would believe that the sun was but a happy dream. Finally it broke. A clear night cold enough to bring about the season’s first hard frost turned into a morning equally clear with warm sunlight burning moisture from every surface.
“Why is the air white?” asked the middle child as we drove her sibling to school. I rattled off a hasty explanation, still annoyed that nearly seven hundred mornings of getting out the door had not been enough to train us to depart in an orderly, non-shrieking manner. After everyone was safely deposited in their classrooms I sped off on a round of about-town errands with no other goal in mind but to get them done and move on to the next task as soon as possible.
I drove east past the rear of a residential neighborhood separated from the street by a line of weathered wood fencing, admiring the few leaves still hanging mulishly to the tress. I noticed what I first thought was dryer exhaust rising from a single backyard. But unlike the usual behavior of dryer exhaust, this exhaust seemed to be floating parallel to the fence-line. Upon closer examination I found that it was coming not from one backyard but from every one. This was most decidedly odd, I thought. Had everyone decided to do laundry on that particular morning? Could the fence-row somehow be directing the exhaust along its border and then straight up?
And then I understood. It wasn’t dryer exhaust. It was water vapor, locked for days in the wood, liberated by warmer temperatures and revealed by my position relative to the sun. I watched in awe until my route took me south; ten minutes later when I headed east again the sun was high enough that the vision was gone.
How can I have not seen such an amazing thing before? In forty years surely those conditions existed before, hadn’t they? Almost certainly they had — but my head was up and locked then and I missed it, concerned over various meaningless minutiae and blind to beauty right in front of my eyes.
What else do I miss in the daily hurry and rush? Half-way or more through this life I can’t expect to be given chance after chance at seeing amazing things. I need to pay more attention now.
Over the past several months ownership of the medical practice my family uses has been in transition. Previously it was part of a large regional group; now it’s owned by a multi-state corporation with strong ties to the Catholic church. Thus far the new management has brought about no perceptible changes but for one: Every hallway, every exam room, every office and (presumably) every janitor’s closet is now adorned with a crucifix.
Somehow we’ve managed to stay out of the bathrooms at our visits so I cannot report on the proximity of these icons to the toilets. I should have checked. Next time I will.
Trapped in an exam room for an eternity thirty minutes (made bearable only by the fact that I was accompanied by my delightful middle child, the one whose easy-going nature makes it seem less necessary to schedule time alone with her) I had ample opportunity to ponder the crucifix’s place in the universe. I wondered (not for the first time) about the genesis of such a gruesome symbol.
How might the world be different, I wondered, if instead of Christ’s body, broken and abused — or even the bare structure of that torture — we looked each day upon a different symbol, one which brought to mind less of Christianity’s magical side and more of its practical application. A hand made whole. A single finger touching the hem of a garment. Five loaves and two fish.
But I guess the magical beliefs are where it’s at for those who decide this kind of thing. Without them, any old do-gooder could waltz right into heaven, and God knows we wouldn’t want that.
It’s not easy admitting envy of your best friend’s children.
She was the same age that I am now when we met. She terrified me; more accurately, I was wide-eyed in intimidated admiration because she so clearly had it all together on every front. Over the thirty months during which F and I worked in the same building we bonded over the love of perambulation as exercise, the practicality of carpooling and the ability to integrate the word “plethora” into everyday conversation.
At twenty years old and with no deeper understanding of abuse than a slug has of its own salting, sudden painful stabs of envy for F’s children even then caught me by surprise. We visited one day in her kitchen as she marshaled her daughters through homework (their enthusiasm was tepid at best) and the preparation of dinner (spaghetti, from a box), unable to understand what it was that made the very atmosphere in her house different from my own but knowing that I craved it.
I observed from a distance as she raised children alone while working full time and studying for a terminal degree. Later I saw her fall in love with and marry a man raising his own large family completely alone. It was hardly a fairy tale. Daughters from two families integrating themselves into one house (and one small-town high school) proved almost fatally difficult; there were times when F thought the teen-aged fractiousness had damaged relationships to the point they’d never heal. And yet over and over again I watched F do something I never saw in my own family: No matter what hare-brained decisions her children made (and oh there were a few), no matter what trouble they got themselves into, I don’t think she ever stopped loving them. And while they surely felt from time to time F’s fury, they never wondered if she loved them. Never.
They’re all adults now, all happily enjoying careers and children; and like everyone who knew no life before cell phones and CDs, they are all on Facebook. More specifically, they are all on my Facebook. I watch the messages fly back and forth between F and her children, the sisters who once would have been happy to rip each others hair out. I love you, they tell each other. So thankful for my family, they write, followed by tiny heart symbols and multiple clicks of the “like” button. Call me tonight, please; I need some advice. Will you watch the kids this Saturday? Mom, can you bring me those pants? We miss you, they say to the one recently relocated out of state. Only ten more days ’til you come home!
No one counts the days until I come home.
I write this on a morning when simultaneous demands from a failing parent and a child embroiled in a work-related crisis prompted a late-night phone call from F. She couldn’t come visit me today, she said, already on her way in one direction after having dispatched another child to aid her sister. Can I help, I asked, but they’ve got it all covered. Their family is complete. They need no more hangers-on. As much as I might wish that F was mother as well as friend and mentor to me, that’s just not the way it is.
I can learn to mother well, but the chance for me to be mothered well has long since passed. This is the bitter envy made even less palatable 500-odd words later.
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